09/25/2026
Antoine Forest was a kid who always dreamed of flying. His family in Coteau-du-Lac, Quebec, knew it from the start. He spent his teenage years chasing that dream. Hiking mountains. Sailing boats. Living life fully on the ground so he could live it in the sky.
He made it. He became a captain. Joined Jazz Aviation in December 2022. Four years into his dream. Thirty years old. Confident. Skilled. Ready for every flight. ✈️
Mackenzie Gunther just graduated from flight school. Class of 2023. His diploma barely a year old. Fresh out of Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto. The whole aviation career ahead of him. Through the Jazz Aviation pathway program, straight into the cockpit as first officer. His first real job. His dream beginning.
That Sunday night, March 22, they were bringing home seventy-two people from Montreal. A routine flight to LaGuardia. Just before midnight. Approaching the runway. The instruments clear. The approach good. The flight nearly complete.
Then something went wrong. A fire truck. Active runway. Less than twenty seconds warning. The plane at one hundred miles per hour. Antoine and Mackenzie in the cockpit. They saw it coming. They reacted instantly. 💙
According to passengers who survived, in those final seconds before impact, Antoine did something extraordinary. He hit the brakes as hard as they would go. Maximum reverse thrust. Everything the aircraft had. Passenger Jack Cabot said: "Looking back on it, the pilot did the best thing he could. He hit the brakes as hard as he could, and he knew it was going to be at the cost of his own life."
The collision was violent. The nose of the aircraft destroyed. Fire truck impacted. Seventy-two people thrown. One flight attendant, Solange Tremblay, hurled three hundred and twenty feet across the tarmac. Somehow she lived.
Seventy people on that aircraft survived because two pilots at the start of their careers made a decision in the last moments of their lives.
The cockpit voice recorder captured their final actions. The flight data recorded their final seconds. But every survivor on that flight knew something that the black boxes couldn't capture: that those two men sacrificed themselves to save the rest.
Antoine Forest will never see another sunrise from the left seat. Mackenzie Gunther will never build the career he dreamed of. But seventy-two people are alive because these two young men understood what it meant to be a captain. What it meant to be responsible for the lives in your aircraft. And what it meant to act when it mattered most. ✈️ 💙
